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Russia Accumulates 16,000 Tonnes of Spent Nuclear Fuel - Rosatom

Posted on: Thursday, 14 July 2005, 00:00 CDT

MOSCOW. July 13 (Interfax) - Russia has accumulated 16,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, said an official at Rosatom, the nuclear energy agency.

Russian nuclear power plants generate 750 tonnes of spent fuel per year and some 24,000 tonnes will have built up in total by 2015, given Russia's plans to build new reactors, Yevgeny Kudryavtsev, Rosatom's head of nuclear technologies, said at an international conference on the nuclear fuel cycle in Moscow.

Kudryavtsev said it could cost up to $10 billion to store that amount of spent fuel underground and that the bare cost of storing it would be up to 3 billion rubles annually.

He said the "cost of storing and recycling" spent fuel must be optimized. Rosatom is looking at alternative methods in this sphere and thinks "our enterprises [are perfectly capable of] creating a simple, safe technology."

The Krasnoyarsk Mining and Chemicals Plant will be able to process up to 100,000 tonnes of spent fuel, using existing capacity and storage facilities that will be freed up, he said. A new complex using innovatory technologies there would ensure a high safety level and make its contribution to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, Kudryavtsev said.

Source: Daily News Bulletin; Moscow - English

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